State visit gifts for the Obamas & the British Royal Family

Obama and his wife, Michelle, gave Queen Elizabeth II a collection of rare mementoes and photographs in a handmade leather-bound album that highlighted the 1939 visit to the United States by her parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

The Obamas gave Prince Philip, a fan of equestrian sports, a set of Fell Pony bits and shanks inscribed with the presidential seal. Fell ponies are a horse breed native to the uplands of northwest England. They also gave him horseshoes worn by the recently retired champion carriage horse Jamaica. The horse is famous for having been saved from the slaughterhouse and rising through the ranks to become the 2008 United States Equestrian Federation Horse of the Year.

For Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, the Obamas assembled a selection of plants, seedlings and seeds from George Washington’s Mount Vernon, from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and from the White House, presenting it along with jars of honey from the White House beehive.

The Queen gave the Obamas a bound album of copies of letters from the royal archives exchanged by U.S. presidents and Queen Victoria, dating from an 1834 letter by John Quincy Adams to one from President William McKinley in 1897. Michelle Obama also received an antique brooch made of gold and red coral in the form of roses.